The Myth of Competition and the Case Against School "Choice".

That most of us consistently fail to consider the alternatives to competition is a testament to the effectiveness of our socialization. We have been trained not only to compete but to believe in competition.

--ALFIE KOHN

For many in our nation, the idea of competition is quintessentially American--the essence of what makes our land and people unique. We compete at softball games and then later at the office. We play trivial pursuit to measure our knowledge against friends and then battle with those same people for promotions, house size, and yearly salary. Living in our free-market system exposes us to competition in virtually everything we do. McDonald's grapples with Burger King, MCI with AT&T, United Airlines with American. To neither notice nor be touched by the forces of our rigorously competitive world is to live detached from society, to live on an island unaffected by the sea.

So it is hardly surprising to find a vocal coalition that aspires to foist the free-market mentality upon our educational system, to pit one school against another, to transform schools into "businesses" and thus foster the same kind of aggressive tenacity that has driven our national psyche for centuries. At the heart of this call for competition is an undying belief that the educational establishment has become bloated, lazy, and unresponsive to the parents who represent their constituency.

Polly Williams, a state representative from Wisconsin who authored the nation's first alternative-education-choice legislation, has supported the competition agenda as a way to remedy the arrogance she envisions in the current system. As an African American, Williams sees a double standard that relegates minority students to an education that is both separate and unequal. Giving parents a choice of schools through voucher plans, argues Williams in the 1994 book Voices on Choice, will force schools to respond to disgruntled parents, assuring accountability by compelling derelict schools to compete for children. William says, "When you empower parents like me, there is a major difference. We want to be responsible for our own lives. We are sick and tired of dependency on social programs that take away all of our will, motivation, and drive."

Williams is hardly alone in her argument. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has also contended that schools have a responsibility to infuse an alienated public with "empowerment." In his 1980 book, Free to Choose, Friedman contends that schools are suffering from a sickness that denies "many parents control over the kind of schooling their children receive, either directly through choosing and paying for the schools their children attend or indirectly through political activity."

Radiating from the words of both advocates is a curious request that schools awaken a public that feels apathetic and disenfranchised. According to both, the schools are villains because of their refusal to give parents a more powerful role, for neglecting their responsibility to inspire not only children but their parents as well.

After reading Williams and Friedman, one is left with some very glaring questions concerning the relationship between the public and its school system. Is the school, as they imply, an arrogant and unresponsive entity that has lost touch with the people it serves? Or is it, as many others have asserted, an institution that has long labored to do many things for many people on a budget that is both meager and uncompetitive? Statistics seem to indicate that the latter is true: public schools, while being badgered to respond to market realities such as "choice," have been starved for funds that most industrialized nations mandatorily expect.

According to David Berliner and Bruce Biddle in their 1995 book, The Manufactured Crisis: "The United States ranked only ninth among sixteen industrialized nations in per-pupil expenditures for grades K through 12, spending 14 percent less than Germany, 30 percent less than Japan, and 51 percent less than Switzerland." With such statistics in mind, one begins to get a better picture of the forever tenuous relationship between schools and their public. For centuries, schools have been asked to perform the Herculean tasks of solving social and academic problems with resources that pale in comparison to both the private sector and to educational systems in other nations. And now our answer is to demand not more money for their effort but more effort through competition.

Perhaps we could all learn something from the Japanese, who Berliner and Biddle note pay their teachers "just about the same as the average engineer" and accord them much of the same veneration. Why, we must ask, doesn't the United States, the richest nation in the world, respond in kind? Can we complain about school performance without examining our collective contribution to its success? Isn't it hypocritical at best to deride the failures of public schools and formulate elaborate programs for competition when we have yet to fund schools properly? Do Williams and Friedman wonder about the "choices" that teachers make when they elect to pursue a profession that tests them for competence and scrutinizes their morals but refuses to make their pay commensurate with their peers in the private sector?

Before the public makes up its mind on the issue of school "choice," they should read Jonathon Kozol's 1992 book, Savage Inequalities, and again ask if real solutions are being offered by advocates. For example, Kozol writes of the grating disparity in San Antonio, Texas, between the Alamo Heights and Cassiano School Districts. As with many segregated schools in the United States, one is filled with the many technological advantages that give children an edge in preparing for college. "In Alamo Heights," writes Kozol, "the air is fresher, the grass greener. The homes are larger. And the schools are richer." The other, however, situated in the middle of low-income housing, is a wellspring for social pathologies and failure. As expected, the Cassiano district gets neither the same funding nor experiences the same successes as its richer neighbor.

But with district spending per student in Texas ranging from $2,112 to $19,333, one isn't surprised when certain kids feel empowered while others are left alienated and angry. Will such financial disparities be remedied through competition? Will hungry, malnourished teenagers find sustenance by being told to leave their current school and attend another? Won't the same social inequities, the same economic problems simply be transported to the new school? Won't better schools simply be out of the financial reach of low-income families? Such questions help expose the inherent problems and contradictions that plague the "school-choice" premise.

Much of the strategy used by those advancing this plan is to tear away at the existing school fabric while simultaneously filling average parents with volumes of false praise and confidence. For conservatives, it isn't enough to starve educators of decent funding; they tell parents that the schools--not the legislators--are responsible for perceived failures. Polly Williams is a showcase of disdain and diatribe for schools. Throughout her tirades, Williams blames the schools for being broken, bankrupt, terrible, unresponsive, and incompetent.

Resonating throughout her words is both a disappointment in school failure and a resentment of the school's arrogance in striving to solve such weaknesses.

Wilbert Smith, a former member of the Pasadena (California) Unified School District Board of Education, echoes Williams' sentiments. In Voices on Choice, Smith assails the school for refusing to change and to allow parents the opportunity to attain a decent education for their children. He says, "If we think we can rely on the education establishment to change education, we have a rude awakening ahead of us."

Explicit within the prose of each critic is the vision of schools as a spoiled child---one that has to behave better before it will receive any more allowance. One needs to recognize this demonization of the schools that underlies the competition proposal. While nothing is said about the paucity of funding or the increase of violence, the spotlight is placed squarely on the educator as oppressive and imperious. It is truly an ingenious way to deflect attention from the real problems plaguing overcrowded, antiquated school buildings and overtaxed faculties. Consider the following description of a New York school, as we again return to Kozol's Savage Inequalities:

   Blackboards at the school are so badly cracked that teachers are afraid to
   let students write on them for fear they'll cut themselves. Some mornings,
   fallen chips of paint cover classrooms like snow. Teachers and students
   have come to see humor in the waterfall that courses down six flights of
   stairs after a heavy rain.

Finally, it needs to be noted that schools in the United States ate far from being the arrogant and publicly unresponsive monoliths that conservatives make them out to be. Quite to the contrary, American schools are run by locally elected boards of education which must, of necessity, be responsive to the demands of the parents who elect them and, in many cases, approve their supporting tax dollars.

One of the most disquieting and bizarre aspects of the school competition idea is its unabashed and monolithic adoration of business as a metaphor for success. Beyond much of the more superficial reasons for advocating competition lies an enduring and consuming veneration for the free market as a truly sacred institution. As a colleague once said, "It has all of the red, white, and blue of a John Wayne movie. It provides us with a nemesis to hate (socialism) and a hero that indulges our egocentricism."

In short, it borders on the sacrilegious to espouse a socialistic system of learning when the United States is the bastion of free-market competition. Milton Friedman, in Free to Choose, may, more cogently than any other advocate, expose the distrust among conservatives of socialism. Early in his chapter, "What's Wrong with Our Schools," Friedman refers to schools as products of "authoritarian and socialistic philosophies." For him, the fact that schools are socialistic, that they are fueled by intrinsic rewards and aesthetic investment, is, to say the least, an anomaly. Rather than considering the efficacy of a system that is driven by forces other than avarice, Friedman simply applies personal economic theories to schools and cites their failures based on his flawed analogy.

The fact that schools are not analogous to businesses--and are a success because of it--may have been best highlighted by Henry David Thoreau. In one of his less-read short works, Life Without Principle, Thoreau refers to business as an obstruction, an impediment to a more profound and spiritual existence:

   I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious and not spend his time
   well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater
   part of his life getting his living.

Thoreau could have been talking not only about education but the entertainment business and its voracious and often embarrassing search for profits--the way integrity and principle become submerged and even forgotten in the struggle for the extra dollar. Or he could have, if he had lived at the end of the twentieth century, written about the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the way it transformed network news, turning even the most prestigious programs into little melodramas for titillation.

Indeed, from the time of the murder on June 12, 1994, to the resolution of the criminal trial, every news program on television subordinated real news so as to cash in on the cheap but lucrative windfall that the murder wrought. Larry King, David Brinkley, Ted Koppel--it mattered little whether the program normally offered "hard news" or gossipy voyeurism. All responded in kind to the "breaking stories" of the life and turmoil of O.J. Simpson and his ex-wife Nicole. In the end, the almighty dollar, the celebrated profit motive, helped to expose the true values of the private sector. Why run shows on the economy, education, or world oppression when the juicy bits of the trial loom as sure moneymakers?

According to Molly Ivins in the July 15, 1998, Lansing State Journal:

   In journalism, the sins of omission always outweigh the sins of commission.
   Like the movies and book publishers--other forms of mass entertainment--we
   in journalism now focus on the sure-fire sellers. Just as the movie
   industry focuses on a new Steven Spielberg, Kevin Costner, or Harrison Ford
   film; just as publishing now focuses on a new John Grisham, a new Danielle
   Steel; so journalism has started to focus on its blockbusters: O.J., Dead
   Diana, Monica.

Perhaps this is why Thoreau argued that "there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, aye to life itself, than this incessant business." Perhaps Thoreau could anticipate the impact the profit motive would have on not only news but TV talk shows and their interminable search for the tawdry and humiliating. Today the Jerry Springer Show might best symbolize the road that business too often takes. With its array of cheap family fights and scandal-driven confrontations, one is left chagrined after virtually every show. And yet, because people do watch and feed the coffers of advertisers, the show goes on unabated.

Of course, Jerry Springer's appeal to the basest of humanity's tastes only pushes other shows to find ways to shock their audiences rather than explore legitimate news. Today we have a cadre of talk shows that specialize in humiliation, violence, and shock. "We wait for the fights," one of my college students told me. "It's what makes it fun."

Such examples should at least make a reasonable person think twice about the claim that competition assures quality, which is the shibboleth most proudly promulgated by the competition advocate. If only schools were more like businesses we would be assured quality and integrity--right? Business would automatically weed out the shiftless and replace them with those committed to a Puritan work ethic--right?

We need to put more "of our entrepreneurial system into education," said Representative Pete Hoekstra (Republican--Michigan) while debating school reform in 1994. And yet, one wonders if Hoekstra wants more of the "system" demonstrated by Jerry Springer or Ricki Lake. Or perhaps Hoekstra and his conservative friends aspire to model our schools after the many health maintenance organizations and their policy of saving money by denying patients care. One can only wonder what new and wonderful directions the business metaphor will take us in education.

Then again, perhaps what Hoekstra and other conservatives want is more of the gritty, no-nonsense productivity that is supposedly a ubiquitous element of the private sector. Except that, when we talk of the hard-nosed American work ethic that is supposedly pervasive throughout the free market, we again come upon some embarrassing contradictions. For instance, research seems to show that many of the top American chief executive officers in our vaunted free market are neither as productive nor as innovative as the myth claims. In his 1991 book, In Search of Excess, Graef Crystal writes in provocative detail about the cushy, risk-free life of America's top CEOs. According to Crystal, they receive "bloated pay packages" that contain "hardly any pay risk. Those CEOs get paid hugely in good years and, if not hugely, then merely wonderfully in bad years. So even the defense that pay is required because of the high risks being taken is shot full of holes."

Perhaps what is most ironic, considering the constant talk of competition, is that American CEOs are clearly not competitive with their Japanese and European counterparts when it comes to compensation. Indeed, in Japan as well as in much of Europe, the polarity between pay for the CEO and the average worker is much smaller. In the United States, the CEO makes 160 times that of the average worker, while in Japan the gap is under twenty; in the United Kingdom, the difference is under thirty-five.

Finally, one wonders what will happen to the proverbial Johnny and Jane in a system that aspires to make money as its primary goal. Will the incorrigible student receive the same assistance as the witty, sharp pupil? Why bother with the emotionally challenged child if profits are already good? And then, what if learning becomes too expensive? Will we see corporations outsourcing so as to replace certified teachers with paraprofessionals? And will classes be large so profits remain high?

In stressing the inimical aspects of competition, I am also contending that aggression and acrimony be replaced by collaboration and cooperation as a logical alternative to the survival-of-the-fittest scenario espoused by the school-competition agenda. Alfie Kohn, whose quotation led off this article, penned a very fine book in 1992 on the case against competition, calling it an artificial response to the pressures of a society that has been conditioned to believe that it should be competitive. In No Contest, Kohn notes that competition is neither inevitable nor desirable and that a close scrutiny of the research exposes this salient fact. Humans, unlike other animals, define themselves as evolved and advanced through social cooperation rather than a Spenserian kill-or-be-killed scenario. To quote Kohn: "Superior performance not only does not require competition, it usually seems to require its absence."

In the end, then, there are many reasons to nurture a love of education that celebrates our desire to learn for the intrinsic rewards it offers. The analogy that asks us to compare our children to factory material is both inaccurate and inhumane and fails to acknowledge the inherent love of information that all social beings possess. In the future, one can only hope to see business adopting the aesthetic-driven philosophy of the academic world--where humanistic endeavors have supplanted a lust for profits and where people are treated like people, not material waiting to be processed for our nation's war on ignorance and illiteracy.

Gregory Sharer is a professor of English at Mott Community College in Flint, Michigan. He has previously published articles in English Journal, California English, and other academic publications.